‘No problem. Of course, you’re lucky it’s only the authorized ones you want.’
It stopped me in mid-celebration. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, a lot of people tuning in these days—’
I started to feel sick.
‘Use pirated boxes,’ he continued. ‘Chinese, mostly – if it’s not Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags, they’re counterfeiting boxes and our access cards. They sell ’em through small electronic shops and internet cafés – places like that. It’s big business. Once you’ve bought the box and card, the service is free. You there?’
‘In somewhere like Muğla,’ I said quietly, ‘how many pirated boxes do you think there would be?’
‘A place that size? Ten thousand – maybe more. There’s no way of tracking who has ’em, it’s totally underground. Next year, we think we’ll have the technology to trace—’
I wasn’t listening: next year we could all be dead. Ten thousand boxes and no subscriber list made it an impossible task. I thanked him for his help and hung up.
I stood motionless, the silence crowding in and the black dog of despair biting at my heels. To have had my hopes raised and then so comprehensively dashed was a hard break. For the first time since I had been press-ganged into the war, just for a few moments I thought I had a real way into the problem. Now that it had turned to dust, I was in the mood to be brutal with myself.
What did I really have? I asked. I had compiled a list of phone boxes; by a stroke of good fortune and the work of a team of Italian experts I had stayed in the game – and apart from that? Anyone who didn’t need a white cane could see that I had very little.
I was angry too. I was angry at the fucking Chinese for not controlling the wholesale piracy of other people’s ideas and products, I was angry at Bradley and Whisperer and all the rest who weren’t there to help me, and I was angry at Arabs who thought that the bigger the body count, the greater the victory. But mostly I was angry at the woman, and the man in the Hindu Kush for staying ahead of me.
I walked to the window and tried to find a pocket of calm. The exercise with Sky hadn’t been a complete bust: it had taught me that the woman almost certainly lived in the area, and that was real progress. I looked across the rooftops – she was out there somewhere. All I had to do was find her.
I tried to see in my mind which of the phone boxes she had been standing in, waiting for the phone to ring, but I had no data, and all I could draw was a blank. Yet I could hear the traffic going past and I listened to the muzak – the radio station, or whatever it damn well was – playing faintly in the background.
Come to that, I thought, where was the update on the music? What were Whisperer and those guys doing back home? Wasn’t the NSA supposed to be trying to isolate, enhance and identify it?
I was in just the mood to vent my frustration so, even though it was late in New York, I didn’t care. I picked up the phone.
Chapter Thirty-seven
BRADLEY ANSWERED AND told me he wasn’t in bed, but, from the sound of his voice, he was clearly exhausted. Well, so was I. He started to ask about Dodge’s death, just to maintain the cover, but I cut him short.
‘Remember the music we spoke about?’ I said. Of course he didn’t, he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘There was the sound of traffic, it was playing in the background—’
‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ he said, getting with the programme.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Somebody was supposed to be drilling down, trying to identify it.’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard.’
‘Get on to it, will you? Make some calls.’
‘Sure,’ Bradley replied, offended by my tone, immediately getting as irritable as I was. ‘When do you need it by?’
‘Now,’ I replied. ‘A few hours ago would have been better.’
Hungry as hell, I was on my third stale candy bar from the mini-bar, and sitting in the chair, staring out at the town and thinking about the woman, when the phone rang. It was Bradley, and he said that the music was pretty much a bust.
‘They’ve filtered out the noise of the New York traffic,’ he said. The reference to New York was meaningless packaging. ‘And they’ve enhanced the music. It’s Turkish, of course. It seems it’s being played on a kaval—’
‘A what?’ I asked.
‘A kaval. A wind instrument, like a flute apparently – seven holes on top and one underneath; they’re the melody keys. It’s a folk thing. The story is that shepherds would use it to lead their flock.’